Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath; Who Do You Think You Are? – TV review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/sep/12/operation-stonehenge-what-lies-beneath-tv-review

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A man runs his hand lovingly down the inside of a pit dug in the middle of a nondescript acre of grassland. The exposed slice of soil is striated like a (particularly unappetising) Wall’s Viennetta. Here’s the layer of modern detritus, there’s a layer of medieval stones and beneath that a layer of prehistoric cobbles. And “the best thing about this is that it caps 14 centimetres of intact mesolithic archaeology, full of flintwork and bone,” explains David Jacques, one of the many quietly exuberant men we will meet in the course of the coming hour (and they are almost always men, which is a discussion we will save for another time).

He pulls something out of the compacted earth like a child pulling a toy from its Christmas stocking. “I think it’s a little blade,” he says, turning the most nondescript flake of stone over in his fingers. “A very nice piece.” It can only be BBC2. It can only be a documentary about Stonehenge. Which is to say – for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. I like it very much, with the proviso that grey-tinted Druidic recreations by unconvincingly bewigged actors be kept to an absolute minimum.

Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath came within a Neanderthal ridge of running foul of this rule, but was otherwise splendid. It followed the Hidden Landscape Project being carried out by archaeologists from Austria’s Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the University of Birmingham. Technology capable of sounding and interpreting the earthy deeps has enabled them to compile, in five years, a body of knowledge that would have taken a lifetime’s manual excavation of the Stonehenge site to complete.

The result is a multilayered digital map that shows the area’s evolution in both time and space. Longbarrows rise again in pixellated form along ancient lines. Light depressions in the grass become the mouths to flint mines once more. Spectral palisade walls appear, battlegrounds are restored, faint scars on the land and crumbling skulls within it are refleshed.

The new information gathered has yielded insights into how the Stonehenge site was used and how its many monuments – not just its most visible and famous ring of standing stones – worked together. Chance geological and topographical features made it first a magnet for aurochs and then for their hunters. Its natural bountifulness, coupled with the tendency of drying flints to turn a magical – if you didn’t know about the algae in the local waters that were responsible – cerise pink, encouraged neolithic man to invest the place with mythical significance and to pour his labour into digging enclosures, protective ditches, commemorative mounds, processional paths and sacrificial shrines and other, smaller henges around the one which it had previously been assumed had always stood in splendid isolation.

Whether this miracle performed by modern technology equals those performed by ancient man with his bone pick, tranchet axe and indomitable will, who’s to say? I would like to know whether even the collection of so many millions of data points matches the delight of pulling a flake of prehistoric flint from the earth and turning it over in your fingers, though. Equally wonderful in their own ways, perhaps, but maybe not quite equally full of wonder.

There was another delving into the past, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1), which looked into the family history of cook, food writer, Great British Bake Off judge and human doily, Mary Berry – so pretty, so frail-looking that I always fear for her safety on GBBO. What if a drop scone drops on her? Is she insured by the National Treasure-y?

It is clearly her optimism that keeps Berry young. She was presented with indisputable evidence that one of her forebears was a baker – hurrah! But he adulterated his bread so badly that the parish poor, who were given it free, were forced to complain to the council (on which he sat, and which had awarded him the bread contract) that it was inedible. Mary just said firmly: “I like to think that he was a good man, worked very hard and that it was a lovely family business.” Alrighty!

She was less inclined to forgive another ancestor’s bankruptcy – he ran his family printing business into the ground and pitched his wife and six of their eight children into the workhouse. But her spirits were restored by the news that his oldest child had managed, in an unforgiving world, to raise her illegitimate sons well enough for them to become successful in various different, respectable careers and who died with at least one of them by her side. Just a flake of a miracle, this time, but of course, sometimes a flake is all you need.